bundle of rushes, or an inflated skin, the elementary boat, the very embryo of navigation. Such beginnings are still in evidence on the western coast of Australia, where savages may be seen sitting astride on a piece of light wood and so venturing forth upon the waters of the sea. Homer, who in the Odyssey delights in making the man of many counsels and many devices, with all his wealth of what was then modern experience, find himself reduced to the shifts and expedients of a man thrown, like the + savage, upon his own solitary resources, pictures to us Ulysses seated astride upon the mast of his shipwrecked vessel and paddling with both hands, thus reverting in his distress, as no doubt others have done since, to the very earliest method of navigation, now only practised for choice by savages, whose progress in navigation, as in other things, has been checked at this early stage, and who remain the nearest visible types of primitive man.
But some savages, other than they, did make progress in the matter of locomotion by water, and the next step was the raft, of which the earliest type known is the sanpan, three pieces of buoyant wood tied together. On this construction, which sup- plied the earliest generic names both in the east and in the west (sanpan, σχεδίη, ratis), a man would stand and paddle and move along upon the water, and assert his power of hand and eye with the weapons with which native ingenuity had already supplied him.
In warm climates, where swimming had become a necessity, and the very children from their earliest years had been habitu- ated to the water, the familiarity that breeds contempt of the very danger which at a previous stage acted as a deterrent, would soon encourage attempts to improve, and enlarge, and increase the speed of the rude vessel in common use. These attempts would naturally follow the line of providing the means for conveying in safety other things besides the living freight of the human person. ‘There would also arise the very natural desire to keep things dry, which would spoil if wetted. Hence the enlargement of the raft, and then the protection
